86. An End to the War

I studied the war plan drawn on the papyrus, and each part was calculated to the utmost of our knowledge of the foe and the varied terrains, with a healthy amount of preparation for the worst-case scenario.

My little brother was a far better strategist than I. I wasn't much of one to begin with; I was no mindless berserker nor honor-bound, but a great general I was not.

I never led any campaign for a reason, well, not alone. I would get impatient and rush halfway through if this weren't an existential threat.

I used tricks and traps, yes, with hundreds of nasty moves, but how, when, and where force should move wasn't something you should ask from me. Unless you hoped for a premature death in a reckless frontal assault.

If something didn't work, you didn't use enough force.

My political manipulations were basic, only close to infallible by the surrounding conditions and directness.

Being who I was, a big bear with blades for fingers, also helped. But I wasn't an idiot unable to understand what was shown to me.

It wasn't grand strategizing there, though, no shade to my little brother. He could do much better, as shown by the numerous prior attacks or even the jungle trolls' blood god temple raid, among others.

I was too direct to make this possible.

But there weren't countless ways to exterminate the Old Gods' vermin children.

Our goal was to reach the qiraji and silithids eggs and many pantries, and getting there required methodical brutality. Now we didn't care about anything else but their destruction.

It was a wholesale, fully assumed genocide, neither the first nor the last.

And speaking of which, I heard his approaching step and turned my snoot in his direction.

"That's a bold plan, Karhu. I approve, we're deep enough to breach this part… and with the new siege symbiotes… It's going to hit hard." I said, and my blue-eyed sibling grinned with pride and something unmistakably darker.

Not as in bad; well, it was mildly sadistic, but toward our enemies.

He was challenging to fight against. He was an outstanding tactician and general, and he wasn't weak himself. But he never fought alone. Hukar, his bodyguard, was right behind, taller and broader.

An oddity for our kind, females were smaller by an average of a third in height and a half in weight. And her twin wasn't small by any extent of the words; I and Ma made sure neither lacked.

I personally assisted in their growth and subsequent augmentations. They were no ursa totemics in raw strength, resilience, and tenacity, but individually as fighters, they were no less dangerous.

They could fight me for some time! I was so proud! And reassured, the better they are, the less chance they would die early, as they would never accept being peaceful.

"Yes, the Ancients are… powerful in those new forms. Terrific, even from the tests we did with some of the weapons you developed. Seriously, an automatic giant rapid-firing crossbow that shoots smart flesh-eating spores? Brother, your imagination is something out of a nightmare." Karhu said, yet his smile remained.

In fact, it grew.

"Oh, please, the big log could have done much worse." Chen quipped, arriving in a cloud of mist that made my sister jump like a startled panther. The pandaren chuckled at her glower.

"Don't give all the credit to me, my students since the incident, are… very motivated. To put it mildly. I had to veto potentially apocalyptic bioweapons multiple times. Flesh tearers are the mildest of options." I said, my light tone an odd mix of joy, bitterness, and anger.

Such things were deceptively simple to assemble once you became a biomancer of middling skills. Life magic was artificially rare for that reason, and they didn't even have the real deal.

What they used was either from me or slowly extracted and then refined from other life forms, and that couldn't be done on the fly. Unless you wished for a poor-quality result.

It was why this profession demanded extreme trust and was always for stable citizens with unbreakable loyalty. And there were further layers if they were compromised.

You don't need highly intricate bacteria to kill thousands; a rogue flower can decimate a swath of land. It wasn't as insignificant as it sounded.

Biomancy was dangerous in the wrong hands.

Perhaps it was hoarding power, but that was reality, and we weren't aiming for a utopia, whatever that word actually meant.

Perfection wasn't aimed for, only good enough, as was in nature. The fittest didn't mean the biggest horns or fangs; it was a balance between millions of factors interlocking together.

Till now, the Wild has worked flawlessly, and we will see if it holds up to the storm to come. This war against the bug was nothing compared to the true danger, but it could cripple us if mishandled.

"And what about the Horde?" Chen queried, a good question.

They weren't absent in Karhu's plan; we were working in tandem, but this raid was almost singlehandedly Wild with pandaren in support.

"Mostly their haphazard version of the Wild Hunt, but they aren't half bad. Lacking discipline, but that's a Horde's quirk. They can't be underestimated; they are not weak." He let out, and I knew it wasn't even before this was the first time he interacted with them.

Notably, when it came to that earth elemental princess and black dragons. And it wouldn't stop after the Second War of the Shifting Sands.

The 'players' or so was what my memories told. Of course, that wasn't reality, but it was enough not to overlook them. They would grow, and the Alliance was the same in that regard.

Half an hour later, we were on the push with crystal vitae all around us, wielded by their own Ancients of War or conglomerates of treants.

The first contact was brutal; Ahn'Qiraj didn't roll over for us to eviscerate them. Their choice to collapse their tunnel network to gain time while we dug and recuperated, but it wasn't sufficient.

Still, they made us pay the price of our advance.

"You alright?" I asked a dark troll I just yanked from an explosive wasp mantis hybrid. The burning acid would have overcome his natural regeneration; worse, used it against itself.

It was a recent development, one of many as of late, as the silithid's adaptability was used in full at the cost of unstable biology.

Those acid wasps were one of the more common and nastiest varieties.

Fighting them in melee was tantamount to suicide. Or at least it was easy to suffer debilitating injuries, and range wasn't the perfect answer. Anything below would be doused in acid.

And they weren't flying freely above the tide; they were used cleverly. They were stored in larger scarabs or dug straight up from the ground. Taking them out was complicated.

They weren't the worst; using more regularly sized arthropods was becoming common.

They couldn't resist the vitae crystals and went rogue, but the qiraji didn't care about the health of their slaves or even themselves.

Those swarms were created to go rogue, and it wasn't as if their pseudo-hive mind was their only method to control their force.

We weren't the only ones good at bioweapons, and I pushed them, not that I had much choice. Or a willingness to do otherwise.

This was an intelligent foe, and it took ample inspiration from my work in a twisted mockery. Winning would only delay their comeback, yet it was all we could do, push them back into their prison.

So we fought, my vorpal bees dancing around me in flowing whips of shredding blades and mandibles.

I was a master of life and death within this domain, and little to nothing stopped my charge. I wasn't growing fat in arrogance; however, artillery was also copied in silithid form.

It was a meat grinder, and nothing came freely. Many died even under my watch; it was raging, but our enemies adapted, and I was seen as the biggest threat.

Counter tactics were naturally born of this; it was simple to see the pattern in how I healed. They targeted the brains, not directly through weapons or projectiles either.

Nerve killing agents were used, and filtering the air as its drawbacks, and they didn't limit themselves to what was airborne.

That was an option of many, of which most were used the deeper we went. Parasites soon entered the fray, and those too were difficult to cull, well needing focus since a mistake was easily made.

And the armies of the Kingdom of Ahn'Qiraj were reckless before; now they were absolutely suicidal, using sheer mass to drown us.

"You…" I growled at a qiraji general, its oversized pincer-like arm, the size of my paw, with the head of a kobold crushed within like a grape.

The sight was displeasing. I wanted it gone.

I leaped, speed far beyond what my size and weight would suggest, from perfected use of explosive, hysterical, and enhanced strength.

The wind whipped like I had become a cannonball, only a hundred times heavier.

The insect's body turned to purple gore and jelly from where my wide-open paw impacted. It also tragically died painlessly, so the qiraji had little sense of pain to begin with, which was unimportant.

It was the thought that counted.

Roots immediately grasped and pushed away the unknown kobold to reduce the chance of destruction.

It wasn't much and likely asinine, but courageous and honorable people shouldn't be left, even in death. It didn't matter that it was illogical.

It was what should be done.

Rushing in was foolish, a trap, and I knew that fact and reacted as it sprang up.

Literally.

I didn't entirely evade thought.

Snapping chelicerae the size of a small house burst from hardened stone to make me mincemeat for the anteater look-alike that emerged.

One perforated my shoulder, making me growl more out of annoyance than pain. I was trapped, impaled high and quickly going down alongside the serrated chitin.

Or so it seemed.

'Eat your fill then.' I internally snarled and slipped off, tissues and bone melting away to reconstruct themselves from the giant appendage.

It was as if I were made of water, a neat trick that was sadly hard to pull off and virtually impossi,ble to do to avoid dama,ge. I wasn't some kind of fluid; I wasn't that fast to pull it off anyway.

I fell down the mandibles, organic plates forming a pseudo cocoon as I did so. The creature bit down hard, saw-like metal teeth grinding me.

But I was past the jaws soon enough with minimum damage and deep in its equivalent of a throat moment after.

I didn't know what I had with these types of suicidal charges, but they proved their effectiveness time and time again —you can't calculate that variable. And I was resilient enough to tell the tale.

There was significantly less self-endangerment here, but that wasn't a reason not to go on a rampage right away, to tickle its insides.

It was a full-blown, extremely acidic, and utterly rancid place; the 'blood' was no different. I didn't want to stay inside any more than this insect wanted.

They were created to poison the ground, making the spread of the Goldilocks and subsequent biome significantly slower. If not, it is virtually impossible without a complete ground screening.

It wasn't regular toxins either; it wouldn't be funny otherwise. And that was limiting our view of the battlefield; they were pouring their venom everywhere they could.

It was as rational as it was vile.

It made my presence in that silithid appear like a vacation, luckily a short vacation. Its muscles contracted, demonic screeches leaving its body as it thrashed in vain.

It shouldn't have swallowed me.

I went straight to the head; they didn't have a central nervous system, but the organs there were plenty important enough to cripple it.

And as I burst out from the chitin helmet, the first person I saw was Chen. His paw touched the chest of a qiraji, who froze before falling with limbs, convulsing to the points where the joints broke.

One of his moves with death in the name essentially reversed one's life force flow locally. Very violent, very ugly, very meticulous, and very fascinating, all things considered.

"I don't judge, but that taste of yours is… peculiar." He said with a playful smirk, and I frowned, the meaning catching after half a second.

Really? That was what his mind first went to. If I didn't have a past life,I wouldn't understand that? And now of all time?

And how did he know that? The fuck did those pandaren authors write in those ten thousand years? Why did he read that?

"By the ancestor, the f-" And a second of those oversized antlion larvae came, I held my ground this time. Roots bloomed from my foot-paws, and magic flooded my muscles.

A throaty rumble left my lungs at the deafening impact, my metal reinforced skeleton straining from the might of that creature. It was no Ursoc, but size and mass with that momentum did compensate for a weaker constitution.

I held the tip of the two offending mandibles, claws piercing the reinforced chitin as my attacker hissed, which became a full-blown agonizing chitter.

I forced Life magic using that contact; I wasn't meticulous, nor cared one bit. It was a violation like few could, but I thoroughly enjoyed making this thing suffer.

It briefly screeched, something primal, before flesh, organs, hemolymph, and chitin transmuted to sap, xylem, and phloem covered in one-toned dark smooth bark—a living statue of wood.

One that lacked roots or leaves to survive–not that the ground would let it live–Malfurion's mistake wasn't to be repeated.

As much as I agreed with what he did to that perfect example of everything wrong an elf could ever hope to do. You kill your enemy and make sure the corpse is turned into fertilizer.

In this world, they had a tendency to rebound even stronger.

Then I lifted it, the battle around seemingly coming to a halt, to gape as a creature five times my height was held. Without further ado, my bioarmor bulged from half my body flexing at once, and with a roar, I threw it.

The silithid turned deadly projectile didn't fly far, but it didn't need to crush the three dozen mix of insectoids and constructs obstructing its landing zone.

And the fight went on, one of many in the weeks that came, and the Horde wasn't absent.

Our tenuous allies' presence was welcomed against Ahn'Qiraj as the buried kingdom grew impossibly more desperate and vicious.

Parasites and pests were next, silithids distorted beyond sanity as if the pure malicious essence of the Old God was made manifest.

Mind-controlling, brain-eating, maggot swarms, and hypervore deathly black locust that breeds faster than aphids.

They weren't so much voidspawns, those corrupted but didn't multiply uncontrollably, it was Life with Shadow magic as glue that made them.

They were set free, and their purposes evidently clear, to eat everything.

Countering them was impossible in such a short time, even if the bulk was eradicated, just as much passed through the interstice of our fangs.

The consequences of which would impact the entirety of Kalimdor for decades to millennia, if not eternity.

But it wasn't enough to change the tides of the Second War of the Shifting Sands, it did the opposite.

This made my hatred of them almost unrivaled, and that singular sentiment was omnipresent, dragons far from spared of it either. After all, you don't break what they believed as order without dire consequences.

Hate rallied everyone, forever and ever. It was the most potent emotion with only equal fear, fear for the sake of it and fear for what could be lost.

And fear bred hate, and hate bred fear, a vicious cycle as old as those primal emotions. Yet here, there was plenty to fear and plenty to hate, all with rationality backing it up.

We gained ground, we broke these infestations, and pushed them through the holes from which they crawled.

There was no grandstanding, no epic final battle; their Twin Emperors did not join the last pushes, as was the same for their higher-ups

They retreated with their metaphorical tails between their far too numerous legs. And we did not, could not follow, unless we wished for what we did to be reversed.

There were too many exits, too many cracks to seal, too many fortresses–anthills–we couldn't kick behind unless we wished for more damage upon us.

We would win but at what cost? So we stayed on the inside, and as our last clamor of this false victory we filled the faults in the Scarab Wall.

The Horde, the Wild and dragons present formed an organic and elemental wall layered with the power of the Light, Elune, the Loa and the Wild Gods.

The combined efforts of the Might of Kalimdor could now dissolve, the Second War of the Shifting Sands ended. And it would not be the last that I knew.

Then the last strands holding back the Veiled Sea broke and half of Silithus was brought under its waves.

But now, we could rest and focus on the future, that was until months later.

The draenei dramatically arrived–but at a different location I remenbered rendering the evacuation of thr tribe there pointless–and less than two weeks after everyone remotely magically attuned felt an immense magical tug from the Blasted Land.

The meaning was clear.

The Dark Portal was going to open, again.